The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one of those tough movies in which a disabled person must fight through this condition before achieving a personal triumph or peace, all the while illuminating the human condition along the way. Most of time this means viewers are in for something relentlessly downbeat, but Diving Bell, though uncompromising in its own way, comes across as aggressively watchable. I hesitate to say I was "entertained" by it, but, despite the protagonist's paralyzed condition, I felt a warm anticipation throughout the film. 

Much of the credit for this is achieved through a first-person perspective that effectively communicates a cynical attitude disguising despair with humorous exasperation. As the film opens, we see what Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) sees, which is quite limited, since he's just awakened from a coma and can't seem to move. We hear his thoughts -- frustrated observations at unintentionally insensitive doctors, sarcastic quips as he understands more about his condition, and even lascivious comments about the attractive nurses. It's actually pretty funny, but all the while we don't lose the sense that the laughs serve as defensive relief against the reality of his condition.

Director Julian Schnabel stays with this first-person mode for a long time, and its strength as a tool for empathy is immense. Flashbacks punctuate the proceedings, and once in a while Bauby allows himself to retreat into his imagination -- for his condition, which the doctors call "locked-in syndrome," Bauby sees himself stuck in a diving suit, and we the audience are stuck with him. Great camera work, by Steven Spielberg's usual partner-in-crime Janusz Kaminski, emulates Bauby's one remaining good eye, as visitors stray in and out of his view, or as he looks around the room and at the people. I think it's one of the best uses of the camera I've seen this year.

Eventually, Bauby must learn to communicate through that one eye of his -- as an attendee, Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze), reads off the alphabet one by one, in order of frequency of use, he must blink when she gets to the letter he wants to use. The process sounds painstaking, and it is, but they get better at it, and soon his frequent visitors are rattling off the out-of-order alphabet and guessing what words he means after two or three letters. Since Schnabel never lets up with the tediousness of learning to work with and use this process (you've never heard letters recited in French so often or so fast), it's actually exhilirating to see the progress taking place. And, of course, it will lead to the writing of the book on which this movie is based.

Although most of the second half of the movie breaks form and we start to observe the disabled Bauby from the third-person perspective, overall we don't learn  much about Bauby the man -- the extended flashbacks show he had a successful career, and we get family details involving his father (Max von Sydow) and the mother of his children (Emmanuelle Seigner). He enjoyed the good life when he could, and he was something of a womanizer. But, frankly, his path from frustrated, self-pitying invalid to man of against-the-odds accomplishment is somewhat generic, but maybe it could only have been that way, for the nicer way of saying "generic" is "universal." Bauby's condition was so random and unpredictable that Schnabel no doubt saw in his story the possibility he could have been any of us. With the methods he used, he's able to create a definitive -- engaging, inspiring, and, yes, devastating -- portrait of the things we realize we must do when almost everything but our mental faculties have been taken away.

(Released by Miramax Films and rated "PG-13" for nudity, sexual content and some language.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.